Strange and Even Stranger

This has been a strange week - and somewhat of a rough week. I find myself once again behind on the Crazy Train blog - and will have to play catchup again - but before I get into that, I wanted to write about this.

I went to college 20 years after I graduated from high school. And I will be the 1st to admit that high school - heck school in general from early on was not always the best experience. Following in the footsteps of my sister and brother was really not in my favor - why - because they were both very good students, and I was the quiet daydreaming kid in the corner! However college felt like the right thing to do -

The 1st semester was so exciting - I didn't sit in the corner, but I was still pretty quiet - at least at the beginning. One of my classes, "Communications for Small Groups" quickly became one of my favorite classes. We discussed a variety of topics - in and out of small groups. I rarely made comments, I wasn't sure about my thoughts, my ideas, then one day just as I was contemplating about raising my hand to say something, a young lady said just about the same exact thing I was thinking. I began noticing that other people, mostly younger and right out of high school had similar thoughts to mine. OK - so I got bolder and starting adding my comments. Now, when we were in our small groups and going through certain exercises, I had to talk - but in the larger class group, it took a while.

This is my round a bout way of saying that sometimes, even artists will have the same idea, maybe even the same process or medium as someone else at the very same time. I recently found myself in sort of a strange situation, on a forum that I'm a member of. I had been playing around with the stained glass butterfly pattern, and had cut a couple of different style wings to see what they would look like. They didn't really work with the other pieces of glass, but I was left with these butterfly wings. I really did get caught up in the butterfly idea - and some of you know where part of this started - but it's also the very 1st thing I learned to do in stained glass - and they are fun to play with.

Well, so I thought - pendants - they would make cool pendants! I cut out some more and started playing around with them.

A day or two later, on this forum I ran across someone who had just made - you got it -a butterfly wing pendant - and it's even out of glass - dichoric glass. So, a little different, same idea.

I just left a comment about how pretty it was, but didn't say anything about just having the same idea.

So, now what to do - I had 10 pieces of glass cut out, wrapped and soldered, and some of them had the 1st layer of paint on them.

ONe of my art instructors told us a number of times that in reality there really are very few truly unique and new ideas in the world anymore - whether it's art or anything else for that matter. Just about every thing that we have, do, art, technology, etc is based on former ideas. Usually somebody elses idea, and that may have been built on somebody else's idea...................

So, what this boils down to - is before you go accusing someone of copying you, - do realize that it is possible for 2 different people to have similar or the same idea around the same time. Now, if they are making an exact duplicate of something that you know you put out there 1st, that may be a different story -

So I'd like to introduce my "On The Wings of A Butterfly" pendants. Maybe I should change it to "wing" but wings sounds better! As of right now, I have 10 of the wings a couple that are odd shapes that I painted part of a wing design on.

So, of course I forgot to put the pictures in 1st and now for some reason I can't copy and paste the text above the pictures!

As I said - it just keeps getting stranger!